


find something waiting right there where you left it

by spacenarwhal



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canonical Character Death, Dreams, Emotionally Repressed, F/M, Families of Choice, Hospitals, M/M, Magic, Pining, Post-Canon, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22046602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacenarwhal/pseuds/spacenarwhal
Summary: Wake up, wake up, wake up.Richie begs, eyes clenched shut and Eddie’s limp body clutched in his arms. He begs and pleads and prays, for the first time in more than thirty years, Richie Toizer prays to God and Jesus and anyone else who will listen to him. He thinks of Eddie, boney knees and a sharp grin, inhaler in hand and fanny pack slung high on his waist, Eddie flushed-red with annoyance and burning with righteous rage, Eddie’s hand in his, small and thin but his grip strong, their bleeding palms pressed together tight.Wake up, wake up, wake up.[Or: Richie doesn't let Eddie die in the sewers. There are consequences.]
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	1. everything stays

**Author's Note:**

> I'm literally writing three different Reddie stories right now and two of them are two very different takes on this idea. If you can bully a space alien into shrinking, you can wish your dead best friend alive y'all, I won't hear different. 
> 
> Also, clarification, Stanley is, unfortunately, still dead in this fic.

_Wake up, wake up, wake up._ Richie begs, eyes clenched shut and Eddie’s limp body clutched in his arms. _Wake up, wake up, wake up._

He begs and pleads and prays, for the first time in more than thirty years, Richie Toizer prays to God and Jesus and anyone else who will listen to him. He thinks of Eddie, boney knees and a sharp grin, inhaler in hand and fanny pack slung high on his waist, Eddie flushed-red with annoyance and burning with righteous rage, Eddie’s hand in his, small and thin but his grip strong, their bleeding palms pressed together tight.

 _Eddie_ , Richie prays, the single word filled with every newly found memory, every dream-denied, every single hope and want and need Richie spent those long Derry years burying, for fear of being different. _Eddie. Eddie._

-

“You’re bleeding.” Ben says, voice faint and dim, like there’s quarry water in Richie’s ears.

“Huh?” Richie asks, heart still beating like a closed fist behind his ribcage, rattling away like it’s trying to escape.

“Your hand.” Ben says, pointing at Richie’s hand, hanging empty at his side.

There’s red-brown spots splattered on the speckled linoleum floors beneath him—red and white, red and white, swirls of grey like a storm cloud, the sickening sound of It laughing inside his head—and he closes his eyes, opens them and half expects the sight to disappear.

“Richie, man.” There’s Ben again, worried, and he’s grabbing Richie’s hand and stuffing a wad of tissues from who knows where against his palm.

“I’m bleeding.” Richie says, tongue thick behind his teeth. The adrenaline that carried him out of the sewers has faded to nothing and there’s a feeling in his head, like his brain’s been replaced with cotton balls.

“Yeah, you are.” Ben says, not unkindly—Eddie would call him a dumbass or a fuck face, would tell him to stop being so stupid even as he wiped his hand down with antiseptic and offered him a Ninja Turtle band-aid—and Richie blinks down at his hand, watches the tissue bloom red spots where the blood seeps through.

-

Ben gets one of the nurses to take a look at his hand. The guy looks like a kid fresh off bedpan duty, but he takes Richie back to one of the rooms and cleans the cut on his palm out properly before bandaging it.

“Looks like you’ve got bad luck with this hand.” The guy says, eyes fixed on Richie’s hand, voice strangely detached even though he’s the one trying to make small talk.

“Uh, yeah,” Richie says, the numb feeling in his chest growing every second he sits here, the fog in his head getting thicker, “Cut it when I was a kid.” Eddie’s hand in his, small and thin but his grip strong, their bleeding palms pressed together tight.

“You’re friends with the guy who fell through the floorboards at Neibolt right?” Doogie asks him, staring up at Richie with a faint light of curiosity in his face. It makes something clench in Richie’s belly, squeeze tight around something spiky and sharp that makes him feel moments from upchucking on the spot.

“Yeah,” Richie breathes, the lightness in his head growing even as the kid wraps the bandage around his palm tighter. “Yeah, Eddie’s my friend.”

Ice cream cones and spitting contests, skinny-stick limbs slick with water, pushing each other back and forth until one of them finally toppled over with a splash, Eddie’s foot kicking his glasses off his face, their legs bookending each other’s bodies as they swung back and forth in the hammock, trading comics and insults back and forth.

“Hey, you okay?”

Eddie leaning over him, bleeding, bleeding, dying. Eddie dead. Eddie dead.

(Like Stan. Stan the Man. Stanley with his too-sad eyes and heavy bouts of silence Richie would try to tease him out of, just talk circles around him until Stan cracked and told him he was being so fucking annoying, couldn’t he _be quiet for once?_ and it didn’t matter that Stan was shitting on him because Stan was talking again and after a while he wouldn’t even be pissed about it, and the quiet changed to something else, something easier to live with and Richie felt like he’d done his job as a friend. And maybe if he’d been there, if he’d been there, maybe Stan— _you didn’t know him anymore_ , says a voice in Richie’s head that sounds so much like the boy Richie used to know.)

“Hey, hey, shit, Mr. Toizer—I need some help here!”

-

Richie dreams in green and blue, the world around him silent. It’s a soft silence, like felt, Richie wants to sink into it, this dense forest of calm, wants to lie down and never move again.

“You’re bleeding.” Someone says behind him and when he turns around there’s a boy there, tall and thin and tired looking, curls falling over his smooth forehead.

Richie looks down at his left hand, the thin trickle of blood dripping off his hand into the soft brown dirt beneath his feet.

He looks up and the boy is in front of him, sad eyes and thin mouth, his hand freezing when he picks up Richie’s motionless bleeding hand in his own.

“Guess you never learned when to drop it, did you Rich?” The boy asks, something fond in his voice, the color of a Swainson’s thrush.

“You know me, Staniel.” Richie answers and the boy isn’t a boy anymore. He’s older now, a little shorter than Richie, but his nose is the same, his face still adorned with the same pensive eyes. A familiar stranger.

Still sad, Richie notes, looking down at their hands, his skin stitching itself back together like its been zipped from the inside until there’s nothing left over but a scar.

“I do.” The man agrees, resting Richie’s hand against his chest, his newly healed palm tingling as it presses over his own heart. 

-

_Wake up, wake up, wake up._

The forest falls away and Richie’s heart accelerates, panic jabbing razor sharp behind his navel as he takes a deep breath.

“Richie, honey, you with me?”

He can’t see shit but he can make out the glare of Bev’s red hair, the only discernable feature he can make out without his glasses.

It takes him a minute to figure out she’s talking to him and other to put together that he’s lying in a bed and there’s something on his finger and sticky tabs on his chest.

“Fuck.” He exhales and the Bev Blob moves towards him, her smile coming into focus as she slides his glasses up his nose. Her face fractures as his sightline travels through the cracked lens but he adjusts his own stare to ignore it as best he can.

“Hey,” Bev tries again, still smiling softly, concern etched into the lines around her mouth. “You scared us back there, Rich.” Her hand slips around his wrist, right over the edges of the bandages there—Doogie Howser, right, Richie remembers that too—and Bev holds on to him, her freckled fingers and clipped nails and strong grip the same that Richie remembers from way back when.

“My hand was bleeding.” Richie says slowly, his brain still rebooting. His dream folds into itself, soft as clay, folds and folds until he can’t remember it beyond the fingerprint impression of it left on the surface of his mind.

Bev nods, frowning slightly. “Yeah. The doctor said you’ve got a concussion too. You hit your head when you—” Her voice trails off.

Richie doesn’t remember, not really, red and white and black so deep there was nowhere for Richie to go but to sink into it, deeper and deeper until it was all he knew. The Deadlights.

It’s laughter in his head and nothing else, nothing else but the sickening dread, the fear, the bile-thick fear choking him from the inside.

Eddie. Eddie dying. Eddie dead.

_Wake up, wake up, wake up._

(Eddie’s hand in his, small and thin but his grip strong, their bleeding palms pressed together tight.)

“Richie?” Bev tries again, and Richie doesn’t know how long he spaced for, Bev pale under her freckles, worry written all over her face when Richie can finally focus on her again.

“Eds?”

Bev tries to smile again, shaky and small though it is. “They’re still working on him.” Her fingers squeeze hard around his wrist. “He’s stronger than he looks though, you know that.”

Richie tries to nod, and it’s a good thing he’s lying down because it sets his head swimming again. “Yeah he is.” He manages, closing his eyes in hopes the room will stop spinning. “He’s strong.”

Bev’s mouth trembles, her eyes brighten with unshed tears. “What you did down there Richie, it was—you brought him back. You believed and it brought him back.” Her voice cracks.

Bev’s face distorts and it has nothing to do with the cracked lens in his glasses, his eyes burning as he looks at her.

“Never learned when to drop it.” Richie mumbles, his palm burning under the bandages.

-

The doctor doesn’t see any reason to keep him so Richie gets discharged into the tender care of his friends.

Mike wraps his arm around Richie’s aching shoulders and steers him towards the hospital cafeteria two floors down. “How you feeling, Rich?” Mike asks once he’s got Richie settled into a hard plastic seat. The cafeteria smells like Richie’s gran’s house, like fake lemons and bee’s wax, makes Richie’s headache worsen.

“Like day old shit.” Richie answers, sagging further into his seat, upsetting the ache running through his body. He wonders if Eddie was right, if he maybe caught something down in the sewers and now he’s going to die from like tonsil cancer or super tetanus or something.

“I’m gonna grab us some coffee, okay?” Mike says, “See if that helps.” Richie watches him go, right thumb pressing hard against the hot line slashed across his left palm, buried though it is under layers of bandages.

It feels like his heart’s beating in his open palm, the thrum of it throbbing up his arm and throughout his body, upsetting the pain deep in his bones and every muscle in his body. 

_Wake up. Wake up. Wake. Up._

“Eddie.” He breathes, and the throb intensifies, a drop in his gut that makes him feel like he’s freefalling, and he half-expects the floor tiles to disappear from under his feet.

He doesn’t know how he manages it when standing feels like the single hardest thing he’s ever had to do, sweat beading on his skin and breath short from nothing more than staggering towards the cafeteria door.

“Richie!” He hears Mike call after him, but he can’t stop, knows if he stops he’ll lose all momentum, knows he’ll sink and disappear into nothing, so he stumbles towards the elevator bank, lets the doors close behind him and sinks against the elevator wall to catch his breath.

Shit, Richie thinks, wiping cold sweat from his face, he knows he’s out of shape but whatever the fuck this is—he doesn’t even know what the fuck this is. A heart attack, maybe, like the one that took Dad.

The door opens and Richie doesn’t remember pushing a button but something compels him forward, one foot in front of the other, further and further down another hospital hallway nearly identical to the one he left behind.

“Hey Richie, I thought you were with—” Bill stands, hair unkempt and face shadowed by exhaustion but Richie barely registers him, pushes pass him and turns into the room behind him, dim and cool and claustrophobically small.

There are machines everywhere, beeping and blinking, blinking and beeping— _beep, beep Richie_ —and Richie’s left hand burns, he almost expects the bandages to burst into flames.

Atop the blankets, Eddie’s right hand rests motionless, wrapped in bandages identical to Richie’s, and Richie’s heart races faster, hurts harder, his whole body trembling.

“Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up—” he can hear himself chanting under his breath, reaching his left hand out until its gripping Eddie’s right. It’s all wrong, how motionless he is, fingers warm but so still. All wrong. He needs to fix it. 

(Eddie’s hand in his, small and thin but his grip strong, their bleeding palms pressed together tight.)

Relief fills Richie like a wave, like stepping into the cool green water of the quarry, calm lapping at his ankles, rolling up his legs, swirling around his waist until its rushed up his chest, rolling over his head, filling his ears and burning his eyes.

The burning in his left palm dims, dims, diminishes to nothing as the pain in his body recedes.

“Wake up.” Richie says and Eddie’s fingers twitch against his and grab hold.

-

“I could hear you.” Eddie says later, words slurred from drugs and sleep, “I—where I was, I could still hear you.” He smiles, the shape of it too big somehow for his face, like a child looks drowning in his parent’s clothes. “Never shut up, Trashmouth.”

Richie laughs for what feels like the millionth time since Eddie woke up and started talking, and just like the last million times, it isn’t long before laughter melts into something different, rattled and thin, a sharp wet wheeze from deep in Richie’s chest.

“Don’t cry, Rich.” Eddie says again, like he’s forgotten the last million times.

“Don’t tell me what to do.” Richie bites back, still holding Eddie’s hand.


	2. but it still changes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie’s still half-waiting for Eddie to kick him to the fucking curb but Eddie hasn’t yet, dozing on and off or happy to read whatever newspaper they bring him. “Hey, did you know the church is hosting a Swap Meet next month in the school gym. Donations welcomed.” He comments drily, grinning faintly up at Richie. There’s color in his face where it wasn’t before, healthy and well-rested, his eyes brighter than they looked even on that first night they all came back together. Even the wound on his cheek, tended and stitched together at last, looks less angry now, like it knows it has time to heal properly.
> 
> Richie can’t help but smile back, fires back a half-assed wise crack about donating one of Eddie’s enormous suitcases. It isn’t especially funny, but Eddie rolls his eyes and calls him an asshole and Richie feels like he’s swallowed a lit candle, his insides scalded and blistered and glowing so damn bright its sickening.

Eddie wakes up and the doctors all seem genuinely flabbergasted when he recovers faster than anyone anticipated.

Richie doesn’t think any of them, not even Eddie, cares too much about the why of it, just happy that they haven’t lost anyone else in this fight. They’ve been sickening co-dependent in the week following the shitstorm down in the cistern, all of them taking turns coming in and out of Eddie’s hospital room, rotating through unofficial shifts so that Eddie’s never really alone.

Richie’s still half-waiting for Eddie to kick him to the fucking curb but Eddie hasn’t yet, dozing on and off or happy to read whatever newspaper they bring him. “Hey, did you know the church is hosting a Swap Meet next month in the school gym. Donations welcomed.” He comments drily, grinning faintly up at Richie. There’s color in his face where it wasn’t before, healthy and well-rested, his eyes brighter than they looked even on that first night they all came back together. Even the wound on his cheek, tended and stitched together at last, looks less angry now, like it knows it has time to heal properly.

Richie can’t help but smile back, fires back a half-assed wise crack about donating one of Eddie’s enormous suitcases. It isn’t especially funny, but Eddie rolls his eyes and calls him an asshole and Richie feels like he’s swallowed a lit candle, his insides scalded and blistered and glowing so damn bright its sickening.

Eddie’s attention has always had this effect on him, he thinks, happy to sit in the chair he brought in from the hallway and set up at Eddie’s bedside. Richie’s always been hungry for it, desperate to have whatever scrap of attention he could get from whoever he could get it. His parents, his enemies, his best friends. Eventually he forget them, replaced them as best he could with new people, new acquaintances, bigger audiences, but none of it ever felt like this, never felt as good as Eddie looking in his direction, whether it was to chastise him or share a joke, nothing has ever left Richie feeling full and sated without the need for anything else.

(Eddie’s hand in his, small and thin but his grip strong, their bleeding palms pressed together tight.)

He called it relief, back at that disastrous dinner at the Jade, and it still feels like that, like breaking through the surface of water when you were sure you were moments from drowning. But its more than relief now, the further they get from Neibolt, its growing, blooming into something Richie can’t even name. Not yet.

-

The quarry water is crystal clear.

Richie leans over the ledge of the cliff side, and the water’s so clear he thinks he can see straight to the bottom.

“You need to do it.”

The boy’s back, dour-faced and serious and Richie wants to tell him he’s going to, that he’s not a pussy, but the minute he looks at the boy Richie knows he doesn’t mean jumping.

“No.” Richie answers, and its not his voice, age-stained and tired, it’s one he hasn’t heard in a long time, before puberty cracked his voice the way a sledgehammer splinters concrete. He doesn’t need to see himself to know he’s a child, jolly green giant limbs spazzing all over the place and coke-bottle glasses magnifying his scared eyes.

“Richie,” the boy says, and for the first time he sounds upset, panic bleeding into his voice as he reaches for Richie’s hand. “It’s hurting you.” Richie tries to pull his hand back, but it sets off a spike of pain that had been sleeping dormant before, so overwhelming he cries out and stops struggling. He looks at his hand in the boy’s pale grip, his thin fingers squeezing so hard Richie thinks his wrist is going to snap.

Richie screams when he notices the open gash in his hand, the blood running down his palm and over the boy’s fingers, bright red and hot everywhere it touches.

(Eddie’s hand in his, small and thin but his grip strong, their bleeding palms pressed together tight.)

“You have to do it.” The boy says again, “You have to let go.” The urgency in his voice peaks, his grip tightens even more.

Richie takes a step back, as though he can put distance between himself and what the boy is telling him to do. The boy refuses to let go, his eyes fixed on Richie’s and his grip unyielding, his pale face full of worry, urging Richie to let go.

“No!” Richie yells, yanking hard on his arm, sending them both toppling over the edge of the cliffside.

-

“Rich, hey Richie, c’mon man, wake up.” Eddie’s hand jostles his, his bandaged palm closing over his arm and giving it a shake. Richie blinks awake, glasses pressed hard into his face from faceplanting against the edge of Eddie’s hospital bed.

“Fuck, fuck,” his heart is hammering hard, his spine going rigid as he rocks backwards so quickly he feels the chair rock with the force of the motion. “Fuck.”

It takes a minute to settle the rattle of panic in his throat, for him to register that he’s not back in the sewers, not buried under Neibolt, not stuck in the dark with Eddie in his arms, dying, dead. It’s dark out, but he can still make out Eddie’s sleep-mussed hair and the faint impression of his pillowcase on the side of his face in the soft glow of the lights affixed over his bed. His brow is pinched, folded into itself with something like annoyance, familiar enough it soothes the frayed edges of Richie’s nerves.

“You alright man?” Eddie asks, soft and low, and Richie’s rapidly firing synapses slow just enough for him to register it isn’t annoyance on Eddie’s face. It’s concern.

“Yeah, Eds. Yeah. I’m fine.” He rubs at his eyes under his glasses, wipes at the thin, damp skin under his eyes that is probably just sweat.

He’s not really sleeping. He’s tried, once he knew that Eddie was going to be okay, took himself all the way back to the Townhouse to shower and got as far as laying down on the bed before he realized he couldn’t. The sickening lurch was back in his belly, pulling hard with every breath he took, pulling and pulling until he got out of bed and dry heaved into the toilet for what felt like ages.

He tried again but all his limbs prickled, pins and needles vibrating across his skin, pulsing outward from the epicenter in his left palm, the hollow blackhole yawning in his gut growing wider with every second his lay there.

He threw clothes back now and walked back to the hospital, and it wasn’t until he was back in the hospital, back in the elevator, back in Eddie’s cubicle-sized hospital room, sandwiched on the floor between Ben and Bev that the feeling of wrongness faded enough for him to take a full breath.

He knows that what happened to them, as kids, as adults, all of it, has probably fucked them all up irrevocably in their brains, and Richie didn’t really need that much help pulling screws loose as it was. And maybe, probably, Richie would be better off if he took the time to talk to someone, but he doesn’t think there’s a shrink on the East Coast qualified to hear the yarn he has to spin. There’s no telling it without the killer clown of it all, not without omitting the thought that keeps circling through Richie’s head at night, when he sits sleeplessly in Eddie’s hospital room.

Eddie dying over him, Eddie dying, Eddie dead.

He breathes out.

“You were talking.” Eddie says, moving his hand down the length of Richie’s arm, resting his bandaged palm over Richie’s wrist.

“Regular motormouth.” Richie jokes weakly. “That’s me.”

Eddie shakes his head. “You keep asking me to wake up, Rich.” Richie doesn’t remember that, shakes his head, can still feel Eddie in his arms, motionless and heavy, but his dreams were full of silence, terrible sickening silence, like all the air had been sucked out of the cistern. Eddie frowns, fingers tapping nervously over the bone jutting out at Richie’s wrist. “I’m awake, Rich. I’m right here.”

They haven’t talked about it, what happened down there. Eddie talks around it, like he’s afraid of what lies in the center under all the double speak and euphemisms, and Richie can’t quite look him in the eye when he does, afraid of seeing anything like resentment in Eddie’s face.

(Richie hasn’t seen it but he can picture it in his mind, the twisting tendrils of scar tissue climbing over the length of Eddie’s sternum, threads of new muscle and skin growing over and under one another to fill in the gaping hole left by It. He can see it even if the wound is buried under gauze and bandages, stitched together and kept hidden by Eddie’s hospital gown. Richie knows what it’ll look like as though he’s seen it before and the thought of it makes his stomach tilt forward and up, like its ready to leap out of his mouth.)

Richie blinks and Eddie’s face blurs so he blinks again to clear it. It makes thinks minorly worse.

“Richie.” Eddie tries again, frowning slightly, fingers playing with the skin on the back of Richie’s hand, tracing a idle line. “Richie, when we were down there—I wanted to tell you something—I wanted to say—”

Richie pulls his arm out from under Eddie’s hand, leans back and crosses both his arms over his chest hoping it’ll provide any kind of defense against whatever Eddie’s trying to say. The pins and needles sensation comes back, running across the heart of his left palm, shivering up the length of his arm. Richie clenches his left hand into a fist and does his best to ignore it.

“I know, Eds, you told me about you and Mags. Honestly, I’m touched you felt comfortable sharing that side of yourself with me.”

Eddie sucks in a breath, looks at Richie with round dark eyes, shoulders stiff. “Richie—”

“I’ve gotta pee.” Richie says, and practically runs out the room, palm clenched tight around the pulsating heat in his hand.

-

Bill’s the first one to go.

He’s got a wife waiting for him back home that he actually seems to want to get back to, and a studio person who keeps blowing up his phone every few hours asking when he’s going to get back to work.

“If you n—need anything, call me.” Bill makes them promise, bags packed at his feet and phone clutched in his hand. There’s a prickly nervousness in Richie’s belly, an unspoken fear stewing in all their minds.

What if we forget again?

Mike gets one of the orderlies to take a picture of them all together, crowded around Eddie’s hospital bed, sends it to each of them in their newly created group text.

“Text us when you land.” Bev says, hugging Bill and setting off a chain of hugs and farewell pats on the back. Bill hugs Richie next to last—there’s only Eddie left—and there’s something stiff in the way he holds himself when wraps his arms around Richie.

“I wish—I wish I c-could have done the same. For Georgie.” Bill says sadly and Richie hugs him a fraction harder, wishes Bill could have Georgie back too, wishes they could all go back to 1988 and rewrite this whole terrible story.

“Take care of yourself, Richie.” Bill says, patting Richie’s chest when he pulls back, and Richie doesn’t promise him he will, he’s notoriously bad at it, but he squeezes Bill’s arm and lets him move over to Eddie.

Then he’s gone, Mike going with him to drop him off at the airport.

Richie thumbs open the group chat, stares at the picture of them all together. There’s Ben and Bev squished together on the right side of Eddie’s head, smiling and looking besotted even if they aren’t glancing at each other. Eddie in his bed, fewer machines surrounding him as he continues to get better. He looks better, face fuller, smile wider. Eds looks happy, with Mike leaning against the left side of the bedframe, Bill under his arm, both of them standing behind Richie’s chair.

Richie almost doesn’t recognize his own face, wane and thin and nearly haggard, peering back at him from the picture, but compared to the other five faces looking back at him, it doesn’t really matter.

-

“Full offense, you look like shit.” Bev says warmly, sitting down next to him. She offers him a cup of coffee—not from the hospital cafeteria, Richie notes gratefully—which Richie eagerly accepts, taking a moment to flip her off in thanks for the coffee and the comment.

Bev smiles, drapes an arm over the back of Richie’s seat. He leans against her instinctively, bends his neck at a terrible angle in order to rest his head against her shoulder. Her sweater is soft under his cheek, and Richie lets his eyes drift shut, Bev’s hand on his shoulder and a cup of warm coffee in his uninjured hand.

“Eds is getting something scanned.” Richie says. He’s got a low-grade but persistent throbbing right behind his eyes, like a tiny marching band is throwing a parade directly in his frontal lobe.

Bev nods against the top of his head, her hair tickling his forehead when it falls forward.

“You going to run off with Ben?” Richie asks, the question weighing on him since Bill’s departure.

“Excuse you, Ben’s running off _with_ me.” Bev clarifies with false bravado, and Richie struggles back into an upright position, gets a good look at her. Just the thought of it seems to set her aglow and Richie’s happy for her, but there’s a well of loneliness opening up inside him already, thinking of all of them apart again.

“You’re going though, right, both of you.” Richie says, bone tired and wrung out. He drinks more of the coffee to try to and alleviate some of the pressure in his head. It doesn’t disrupt the circular thought winding through his brain, doesn’t make him forget that soon they’ll all be gone again, back to the lives they led outside of Derry in some way or another.

And maybe they won’t forget each other this time but that doesn’t mean they’ll be in each others’ lives, doesn’t mean they won’t be more than names on a contact list, a picture saved to a phone.

Richie didn’t save Eddie’s life to keep him. He saved Eddie’s live because the thought of a world without Eddie Kaspbrak in it was too horrible to bear. It didn’t matter that Richie had spent the better part of 27 years without remembering him, because Eddie had still existed somewhere in the world, still walked and breathed and yelled at whoever would listen about all the horrible things that could happen from eating raw cookie dough. There's a nobility to it that should be enough, one good deed to balance out a lifetime of acting like a piece of shit, but Richie is still Richie, still hungry and insatiable and selfish. There's a place inside him, dark and jagged as the stones under Derry, a part of himself he's always tried to deny, that doesn't want to go back to a life that doesn't have his friends in it. Doesn't have Eddie in it. After all these years, Richie still wants to be the person who makes Eddie laugh hardest.

Bev looks at him for a long quiet moment, it makes Richie’s skin itch to sit under her contemplative eye, nearly flinches when she asks, “You feeling okay?”

“Peachy.” Richie says, draining the last of his coffee. It makes his stomach cramp, gurgle. He nearly gags.

-

The wound Bowers left on Eddie’s face heals into a neat pink line.

The doctors begrudging tell them Eddie’ll be good to leave within the week, barely a month after they brought him in bleeding and impossibly alive. No one can explain how Eddie’s walking away from that type of injury without lasting physical trauma or a need for physical therapy. For once, Eddie seems content to accept the universal pass, taking the news in stride instead of ordering ever second opinion he can get.

After that it’s like the last string holding them in Derry’s been cut. Bev and Ben announcing over dinner—greasy dinner food Mike brought in and even Richie is tired of tuna melts by now, thinks he would enjoy a goddamn kale salad if it didn’t come from one of the five places in Derry serving edible food—that they’re leaving before the weekend. “There’s some things I have to take care of.” Bev says, voice hard and determined, Ben’s hand at the small of her back. Eddie shakes off the apologetic air around the statement, tells him they’d already stuck around too long.

“I’m okay, really.” He swears, determined little shit he’s always been, “I should probably start looking into flights back myself.” The hard lump that’s been determinedly trying to wiggle up Richie’s throat charges headfirst towards his mouth, acidic and harsh. “I’m gonna—” Richie barely gets out before he’s heading out the door, makes it a few steps out the door before he’s doubling over. He keeps his eyes closed against the wet splat of vomit hitting the grubby linoleum, the first abrupt wave followed by a smaller hiccup, then a few pathetic gags where nothing comes up.

“Shit, shit.” Richie coughs, wipes at his mouth with his sleeve, “Sorry, sorry, I can, um, clean it, sorry.” A nearby nurse is already calling for facilities and Richie’s skin is hot all over, but his chest pumps cold through his veins, the fucking pulsating feeling deep in his hand revving up.

“Richie, c’mon man.” It’s Mike, a cool hand gently guiding Richie away from his mess, over towards the men’s bathroom. Mike doesn’t clean him up, god, the thought of it makes Richie’s stomach turn over itself again, but he stands by while Richie rinses his mouth and scrubs his face one-handed with cold water.

“You’re not okay Rich.” Mike says, upsets something delicately balanced in Richie’s brain, sends a wave of déjà fucking vu crashing over him. “You keep writing us off, but you’re not.”

Richie rubs hard at his face, “I am.” He protests, trying to find something closer to anger to carry him through this conversation but he’s so tired. He’s so fucking tired. He thinks he left everything he had back on the hallway floor.

“You’re not sleeping. You barely eat. You’re always here. Whatever you’re trying to make up for, you don’t have to. You did it. We did it. It’s gone and it’s not coming back.”

Eddie dying. Eddie dead. Blood splattered hot over Richie’s face.

“Mike—it isn’t—”

“Oh fuck, your hand.”

Richie shakes head, still trying to string words together to get Mike off his back, but then Mike’s grabbing his wrist, pulling his left hand towards the sink. There’s blood seeping through the dirty bandage wrapped around his hand, a wave of it strong enough to saturate the binding and drip into the sink, bright red dots that blur into comet tails as they roll towards the drain. “Shit.” Richie breathes, watching with stunned detachment. Mike’s still moving, pulling the ruined bandage off and letting it fall into the sink, turning the faucet on to run Richie’s hand under it.

“Dude, have you had anyone look at this?” Mike asks, brows pinched together, staring down at the bloody mess of Richie’s palm.

“What the fuck.” The blood’s still coming, the old scar opened, lengthened, cutting deep across the width of Richie’s palm, the skin around it looks blistered, burned. It’s the throbbing though, that bone deep pulsing hot-numb feeling that Richie’s gotten good at ignoring, that scares him the most.

His heart is pounding in his chest, he can feel it, like the worst trip he’s ever been on, each of the chambers pumping and pumping and his body goes hot-cold all over, a roaring noise rising in the back of his head.

_Wake up. Wake up. Wake up._

“Mikey, I don’t feel so good.” Richie mumbles, barely has enough sense left to hope he falls backwards and doesn’t bash his face in against the counter when he falls.


	3. lying upside down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adding another chapter to this work to get to the reddie content i crave. 
> 
> warnings for: limb amputation

He’s in the clubhouse this time. Not the clubhouse they nervously picked through only weeks ago but the fortress they made for themselves as kids, filled with amber summer sunlight and birdsong. It’s empty, of course, except for Richie, standing too tall over everything inside, his shoulder hunched and his head bowed to keep from hitting the wooden boards overhead. 

“ _What_. _The actual_. _Fuck_.” Richie yells, swinging his arms out and hitting one of the support beams beside him, flecks of dust and dirt raining down slowly, reflecting gold and diamond-white. The sight of it cuts loose Richie’s tongue, gone numb every other time he found himself in one of these. Now the eerie peacefulness makes him growl low in his throat, and Richie cover his face with his hands and actually screams.

“Ready to pull your head out of your ass and actually listen this time?”

Richie yanks his hands away and there’s the kid, no, fuck, no. There’s Stan. Stanley. Curly-haired and hawk-eyed, looking at Richie with an expression that’s equal parts impatient and amused. It’s Stan, Richie knows it is, recognizes him in the too smart-mouth twitch of his lips and the straight lace line of his spine, head always held high even if his eyes were cast down, too wrapped up inside his own head sometimes to look at what or who was around him.

“You shit.” Richie bites out, suddenly aware of the dark, sticky stain of grief spread out throughout his chest, like rot hidden inside wood. Fuck, Richie misses him, his insides twist around themselves with goddamn longing, loneliness burning his tongue when he hisses, “Fuck you.”

Stan frowns, his hawk-eyes serious, then his mouth curls into a sneer, “Fuck you, Richie. If you’d just freaking listen to me—”

“News flash Casper! _You’re_ dead.” The rot gnaws deeper, spreads faster, and Richie can feel himself hollowing as it eats away at him from the belly up, “And telling me things in freaky dreams I never remember isn’t the most effective form of communication.” Anger cuts through him almost as efficiently as sadness does, and Richie’s mouth has never been drier, his heart never more battered than it feels right now. 

“Shut up, Richie, shut up!” Stan goes red, and suddenly it isn’t the knobby-kneed thirteen year old Riche’s yelling at anymore, but it’s still Stanley, as the man he became. Stanley as he must be—must have been before he decided to end it. “You’re such a fucking asshole.” Says the new Stan Richie never met but somehow knows, and maybe it’s not magic, maybe it’s that he’s still telling Richie off in the same tone of voice he used whenever Richie cracked a Jew joke.

“ _I’m_ the asshole?” Richie echoes, anger still ballooning in his chest, red and shining, rising and rising and threatening to pop. “Who went and offed themselves instead of coming back to face down the clown? Who fucking left us behind?” 

Richie’s chest heaves, and he can’t breathe, can’t fucking breathe, the air inside the clubhouse still and warm the way it always was in the summer, but that never stopped them then, they were all so glad to have a place to call theirs.

“Shit—shit—fuck—” Richie drags in a sharp breath, wet at the center of his chest, and maybe that’s it, maybe his heart has finally exploded under the pressure. His legs shake and he can’t hold himself upright anymore, sinks down to his haunches, and then inevitable rocks back until he’s flat on his ass, the floorboards unforgiving under him.

He looks at Stanley again, standing over him, tall and gob-smacked, mouth clenched tight around something so goddamn tragic that it makes Richie wish he could take it back, take it all back. Wishes he’s been brave enough to off himself when he got Mike’s call instead of having to face this. “Don’t.” Stan says softly, like he can see into Richie’s head, and who the fuck knows maybe he can in this place. “Don’t.”

He lifts his arms and Richie can see clearly then, how the bare thin skin of his inner arms glows as though covered in gold dust.

Richie can see it in his head, as clearly as if he were there.

He can see the bloody trails cut down Stan’s forearms, his dark eyes gone flat and dull with death.

Eddie had looked like, down in the sewers, the ghastly green glow that filled that dark place reflected off his dull eyes, his features slack, the life gone out of him.

But Richie had prayed and Richie had begged and Eddie had come back, he came back and—

“Why couldn’t we save you?” Richie asks, and his voice is ruined, gutted in his throat, he’d be embarrassed if there was room inside him for anything other than uncompromising sadness, the kind of sadness he remembers feeling as a kid, when the world felt like a prison, enormous and inescapable, Derry a cage boxing him in, the secret he carried inside him weighing him down like stones in his pockets.

Stan walks over to him, knees in front of him, and he reaches towards Richie, his golden arms extended towards and wrapping around him, pulling him forward until they were both curled towards one another, hunched over each other’s shoulders like it was the only thing keeping them from sinking into the floorboards beneath them.

Richie thinks he cries, he’s not sure, strangely detached from his body, all his focus drawn by Stanley, the firmness of his shoulder under his forehead, the strength of his arms wrapped around his shoulders, the breadth of his chest pressed up against Richie’s at an angle.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.” Stanley says, and some how they’re just kids again, snot-nosed and stupid, Stan’s arms reed-thin around Richie’s bird-bone shoulders. Richie’s insides lurch.

“I miss you.”

“I miss you too.”

Stan pulls back, blinks at Richie from under the messy fall of his hair. “You need to listen to me, Richie. You need to let go.”

“You keep saying that,” Richie whines, balling his hands into the wrinkled fabric of Stan’s shirt. “But what the fuck are you talking about?”

Stan frowns, “It’s hurting you, Richie. Holding on like this. You have to let go.”

“Fuck,” Richie gasps, jaw unhinging as a thought takes form inside his head, cold and rigid, “Am I dead? Is this you telling me to walk into the light?”

Stan groans, “Jesus fuck, no. Give a guy a break, would you?” Stan sits back on his heels, and Richie wants to pull him back in, wants to hold him the way they never really held each other, not even as kids, Stan always holding himself so carefully and Richie already too aware of what other people might think of how he acted around other boys, even his friends. His best friends.

“They're waiting for you.”

Richie’s stomach lurches, cartwheels right the fuck over behind his bellybutton. Eddie. Eddie dying. Eddie dead. The clown’s claw exploding through his chest. Eddie’s blood warm and nearly-black everywhere it fell. All wrong. All wrong. So Richie pulled him close and prayed and prayed until Eddie—

“He’s going to leave.” Richie gasps, and it feels like something is being torn from inside him, like teeth tearing through muscle and sinew and skin. “Shit—I thought—I don’t know what I thought—I couldn’t let him die, but Stan, I can’t just let him go either. I can’t—”

It hurts, is what it does, like the dead drop from the Deadlights, the bone crushing fall from up high. Richie thought it was enough to have Eddie alive but it isn’t, it isn’t enough to have him alive, like it won’t be enough to know his friends are alive without him somewhere in the world.

The idea of California looms as menacing as the memory of Derry once did, and all Richie can feel is the loneliness of it, the isolation and apathy he chose for himself. Fuck, he really should have switched places with Stan. “I said don’t.” Stan says again, serious as a goddamn grave, “It wants you to feel alone, but It’s lying to you. It lies. It’s not real.”

He half-grins at Richie’s horrified face, wraps his knuckles against Richie’s temple. “You can do this Richie. Wake up.”

-

“You’re such a fucking asshole.” Is the first thing Richie really hears as he wakes up. “Just—such an asshole.”

The world is groaning, shaking under his dead feet, and Richie’s head is throbbing, feels like it might explode any second now, just straight up pop like a balloon stretched past maximum capacity. There’s so much, too much, the clubhouse captured in golden sun, and the bleached bare bones of the hospital, it’s coffin-shaped room, the sewers—grimy green and full of deadlight—the blinding terror lying in wait behind It’s razor sharp teeth, black and grey and red all over. _Splat._

“Eddie—” someone says, and Richie’s heart thuds, thuds, thuds, his mouth moves sluggishly around the name. Eddie. Eddie. _Wake up, wake up, wake up_.

“I’m awake, Rich. I’m awake. I’m right here. Just—fuck—just stay with us okay, just—it’s gonna be okay—”

The words curl around Richie like smoke, thick and heady, wrap round and round his aching body and lower him back into unconsciousness.

-

If Richie dreams, he doesn’t remember it.

-

The next time he wakes up is quieter. Like someone’s turned off all the sound in the world, it makes him panic for a second, and he half-waits for a ghost to appear at his side, hawk-eyed and cryptic, though he can’t explain why. The anticipation dissipates quicker than Richie can trace the shape of it, until there’s nothing of it left, buried under the onslaught of new information for him to process.

He’s in a hospital room. Not the claustrophobic box of Eddie’s room, this one is bigger, another bed lying empty across the way, closer to the door. There are machines beeping quietly and someone snoring softly in the chair next to his bed. Bill, Richie deduces from the blurred edge of his widow’s peak alone.

 _Big Bill_ , Richie thinks, letting his eyes fall shut, the world blur-smudged and unimpressive, _Big Bill to lead the way_.

It pricks, a thorn to the thumb, makes Richie struggle to open his heavy eyes again. Bill is still there, sitting in all his unfocused glory. Richie tips his head sideways, tries to find his glasses somewhere nearby, but he can’t see them no matter how hard his squints, the word remains stubbornly fuzzy. It sends a spike of unease straight through his gut, like a spear through his—

Eddie. Eddie hanging over him, bloody and dying, Eddie sitting below him, bloody and dead. Eddie, skewered and torn and gone.

_Wake up, wake up, wake up._

Richie chokes, air snared tight inside his lungs, his ribs jerking so tightly around his insides he feels like he’s being crushed.

“Rich—Richie. Hey, hey.” Bill’s there, one hand on Richie’s aching chest. Richie tries to talk, he’s so good at it, but his mouth feels like someone’s injected it with rubber, floppy and shapeless, and the air is still stinging sharp at the back of his mouth. “Hey—j-just, you’re okay. Richie.”

Richie lifts his arms, tries to push Bill back, needs to space, he needs to get the fuck out. His head swims, feels like someone shook all the insides loose, the contents all a jumble and none of it makes sense. Eddie dead and Eddie alive, Mike’s eyes on his in the bathroom mirror and his own bleeding hand, Bill leaving and Bill standing right the fuck over him. The clown. The clown shrinking and shriveled and dust, laughing still in his head. His throat spasms, squeezes shut.

His right hand knocks weakly against Bill’s shoulder but barely seems to move him. His left hand—

His left—

There’s no left.

He doesn’t remember too much after that.

-

Bill is still with him when the doctor comes in. Richie didn’t ask but he’s grateful for it, doesn’t know that he could stomach the conversation alone.

Bill sits at his right hand side, one hand resting on the thin hospital mattress. Richie gets distracted by the dull gleam of his wedding band. He can hear the doctor’s voice, professional and sympathetic, explaining how her team had tried their best to save the arm but there wasn’t much they could do by the time they had him. _Extensive nerve_ and _tissue damage_ the good doc says and Richie catches bits in between, closes his eyes for a second and thinks he can feel his left hand twitch, his fingers flex, and there’s a memory there, just out reach. The soft, sweat-damp scrape of Eddie’s hair under his hand as he held him close down in the cistern.

(Eddie’s hand in his, small and thin but his grip strong, their bleeding palms pressed together tight.)

“Your surgery went well and there’s no reason to believe you won’t be completely physically healed within the next month. We can give you a reference for someone in Bangor who can begin the process for fitting you with a prosthetic—”

Richie struggles to sit forward, feels off-balanced, heaves too heavily to the right and feels centimeters from pitching himself headfirst into Bill.

“Eds. Where’s Eddie?”

“Mr. Toizer—”

His head throbs and his body hurts and somehow, somehow, his left palm still burns though there’s nothing there, just air, the old scar and the memory of Eddie’s hand in his gone with it, like it never happened at all. His eyes flood and he doesn’t know if its pain or sadness or the fucked up combination of both, of his lost arm and lost Stan, his broken heart—alone, alone—beating so fucking quick inside his chest he can picture it exploding, painting the cavern of his chest red with carnage.

Bill says his name and Richie sees him, clear as day, but he blinks and it’s like looking through a prisim, Bill fragments and splinters, turns into another Bill, leaving him behind, and another Bill, skinny and pissed, knobby-knuckled fist flying fast at Richie’s face. Bill, Big Bill, in a hospital room saying his good-byes but he’s still right here, still at Richie’s side gripping his wrist like he’s afraid Richie’s going to run away.

“What the fuck?” Richie gasps, squeezing his eyes shut and when he opens them again all the layers have come back together, stitched into a single Bill, whose staring at him, mouth agape and brow pinched with worry.

“Richie—Eddie, he’s here. He’s—”

“Alive?” Richie asks, panic flushing through him like a fever, eating away at every single part of her. The fragmented Bills still dance in his head and he tries to picture Eddie, alive, sitting up in a hospital bed, Eddie reading a copy of the Derry Daily News, but he can’t hold on to it tightly enough, it keeps slipping away, replaced by the memory of Eddie, backlit by the sick green glow of It’s den, bleeding black blood and dull-eyed.

His missing hand burns.

Bill’s face softens, still haggard with exhaustion but at least the spiky fear is gone, his mouth gentled when he says, “Yeah, Rich, he’s alive.”

“Can I—can we see him.”

It takes a lot of wheddling to convince the doctor to let him up considering his impressive freak out, but Bill argues that it’ll help, spins some bullshit about Richie being the one who pulled Eddie out when Neibolt went down.

It takes too long, Richie ready to unhook himself from everything and search the hospital bare-assed in his hospital gown, but eventually the doctor relents. An orderly brings in a wheelchair and Bill helps him, so fucking careful as he puts an arm around Richie’s waist to help him out of bed and into the chair.

His bare feet are pale as fish bellies against the footrests, the empty sleeve at his left side hanging limply, Bill pushing him and his companion IV bag in the wheelchair, down the hall to the bank of elevators. Bill doesn’t start talking freely until the elevator doors close behind them.

He tells Richie that It’s dead, that they killed it, again. He tells Richie that Eddie died, that Eddie was dead, and Richie doesn’t need to hear it, he knows it, the memory of it clear as cut glass. He tells Richie that Eddie isn’t dead now and that it’s Richie’s doing, somehow, thought none of them really understand. “Mike and Ben are at the library—” Bill starts and then stops, the doors sliding open in front of them, pushes them out into the hallway. It’s emptier, quieter, something sleepy and soft to the air here. The walls are painted new-baby blue, Richie thinks its supposed to be relaxing.

“You were out of it, we thought—Bev thought It was still there. Your eyes—they were white and your arm—we got you out and then—the doctors said they couldn’t save it—” Bill starts and stops so many times Richie isn’t sure if it’s the stutter or an actual inability to put the right words together.

Bill pulls them to a stop outside a door that looks like every single door they’ve wheeled passed, and Richie doesn’t feel anything like he did in that other world where he knew Eddie was on the other side, no supernatural force propelling him forward, just a human urge to see Eddie alive, and the human fear to contradict it, inexplicable but so goddamn big it’s all Richie can feel.

“Y-you okay, Richie?” Bill asks softly, and Richie knows he’s not, shit, he’s not. He’s missing most of his left arm and everything keeps sliding back and forth inside his head, some bizzaro world and this world and who the fuck even knows what’s what anymore. Richie sure as fuck doesn’t.

-

It’s somehow worst and still better than Richie expects.

Eddie’s out. Medically induced coma Bev kindly explains, sitting next to Richie and holding his right hand because he can’t bring himself to pull it out of her grasp. He’s alive and no one seems to understand how, but he is, stubbornly refusing to die even though there’s a literal hole through his chest. The doctors keep urging caution but Bev doesn’t seem worried, eyes calm and mouth soft when she tells Richie Eddie’s going to be okay.

“It’s true,” Bev says, her fingers squeezing around his fingers, “because you believed it.”

(Bev’s mouth trembles, her eyes brighten with unshed tears. “What you did down there Richie, it was—you brought him back. You believed and it brought him back.”)

Richie closes his eyes, counts to three. Bev’s forehead creases, her thumb rubs over the back of his hand.

“It gets better, Richie.” She says, her voice too full of understanding. “It doesn’t always seem so real, the stuff you see in there.” Her thumb moves in a firm arch. “This is real, okay. We’re real. We’re right here with you.”

Richie’s eyes drift from Bev’s face to Eddie’s, still and obscured by medical equipment.

They’re here. They’re here.

Until they’re not.

That won’t change.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Everything Stays from The Adventure Zone because I'm in my feelings right now.


End file.
